There were a handful of theaters today that are listed as demolished but are still standing. This is one of them. It’s some kind of factory, as you will see when I post the pictures. Status should be closed.

The information about properties in the City of Los Angeles is available from two sites- ZIMAS, the City Planning Department’s information service, which shows it both on a web page (with a map) and in a .pdf file report, which will have an entirely different type face; and the L.A. County Assessor’s parcel viewer (a somewhat cranky site.) Dating info at both sites comes from the Assessor’s office.

Everything at both sites appears to be digitally generated from a database, but the database itself might have been generated from scans of original documents by some sort of document reader program. The database gets updated whenever there’s a change in a parcel’s status, which is probably done by keyboard entry. There are definitely some mistakes in the database, though I’ve only found a few I know to be wrong. The system appears to be reliable at least 99% of the time.

Here is an aerial view from a few years ago. The building at the northwest corner of 30th and Main is new as it doesn’t show up in aerial photos from the 1940s and 1950s. The remaining three buildings have been there going back to the 1940s. I’m not sure which one was the theater building at this point.http://tinyurl.com/ybhctum

The Dreamland Theatre is listed at 3021 S. Main Street in the 1915 city directory, so the County Assessor’s office was wrong about this building having been built in 1917, unless something happened to the original building and it was rebuilt that year. I suspect it’s most likely that a document reader (human or digital) misread 1912 as 1917.

The Dreamland was most likely this project noted in the August 24, 1912, issue of Southwest Contractor & Manufacturer:

“BRICK STORES AND THEATER—Archt. J. T. Zeller, 203 Currier Bldg., has completed plans and is taking bids for the erection of a l-story brick building to be erected at Main and Thirty-first Sts. for N. J. Sanders, 3025 S. Main St. It will contain four stores and a moving picture theater seating about 800. Concrete foundation 100x88 ft., glazed brick facing, steel beams and columns, composition roof, plate glass store windows, metal frames and sash and wired glass, galvanized iron skylights, stucco theater front, pine trim, plumbing, electric wiring. The site is now being cleared.”

The stores with their plate glass windows have been walled up, but otherwise the building remains pretty much as described in 1912.